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Electronic Investor

What to Read on the Weekend

By

Kathy Yakal

Updated Nov. 1, 2004 12:01 a.m. ET

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Edited by Randall W. Forsyth

WEEKENDS ARE MADE FOR catching up on all that Monday-through-Friday market news and commentary you missed or didn't have time to get deeply enough into. If you're like most Barron's readers, you probably kick back with your favorite financial weekly on Saturday or Sunday to get filled in -- while many investment Websites take a weekend pause.

Yahoo! Finance (finance.yahoo.com) clearly slows down on weekends, because it depends a great deal on outside content feeds, some of which aren't updated on Saturday and Sunday. But the &uuml;ber-portal recently launched a new weekend-only page, Yahoo! Finance Weekend (biz.yahoo.com/weekend), focusing on leisure-time coverage of personal-finance topics. We hope Yahoo! beefs this up, because its early incarnation is fairly lightweight. Still, the content is good -- what there is of it.

Recent stories examined the most expensive U.S. restaurants (from Forbes.com), actress Salma Hayek's favorite places in the Bahamas (Travel + Leisure), and increasing respect for U.S. cheeses (The Wall Street Journal Online). A sprinkling of market content looks back at the previous week and ahead to the next. Hmmmm. Better to head to sites like the New York Times (www.nytimes.com) and the San Jose Mercury News (www.mercurynews.com) for weekend business reading.

BusinessWire (www.businesswire.com) doesn't snooze through the weekend, although its story velocity certainly declines. Founded in 1961 with seven clients and 1&frac14; employees working out of a broom-closet-sized office, BusinessWire has been known through the decades mostly as a conduit between companies making announcements and the journalists who cover them. Its introduction on the Web has made it a great tool for investors who want to grab raw news before it's shaped and posted on news sites.

The service has evolved through the years from a repository for press releases to a customizable research tool. You can set up your own home page, selecting from news headlines in a variety of subjects, industries, geographical areas and languages. BusinessWire builds a page with stories covering only those interests, or you can view all the latest news headlines and archives, organized by date or content category. Or you can search by keyword or phrase. The site also posts brief company profiles, but we were surprised to see no entries for
Microsoft,Sun Microsystems
(although Sunflower Systems was there) and
Hewlett-Packard.
Good, fast, original-sourced news, but we still prefer CBS MarketWatch (cbs.marketwatch.com) and Reuters (www.reuters.com) for market news.

The Web is fertile ground for financial professionals who hawk their services. Some pull you in with a handful of free services but are really looking for clients. Then there's James J. Puplava, proprietor of Financial Sense Online (www.financialsense.com), who emphasizes the free stuff but has an oh-yeah-we-sell-these-services-too attitude on his site. Puplava, president of Puplava Financial Services, a 20-year-old investment-advisory and money-management firm, has educated and advised many investors via radio and Internet-based shows as well as seminars.

Financial Sense Online is heavy on commentary, both from Puplava and a raft of regular contributors. They're not necessarily household names, but each posts his credentials and/or links to a Website. Daily market wrap-ups are hosted by contributors, and a variety of charts and graphs are dropped in. The day's top 10 stories (not all finance-related) are pulled in from major news sources. "Joe's Diner" picks a theme every week and culls related stories from the Web; when we looked, it was "$70 a Barrel Oil?" Since 2000, Puplava has alerted readers via his "Storm Watch," a well-researched running commentary, to ominous market signs.

The economy is still at the forefront of the news these days, thanks to the overheated presidential campaign. We recommend you get your spin-free updates from original sources on the Web. The Economic Cycle Research Institute is one such venue. ECRI was founded by Geoffrey H. Moore, who developed, among other benchmarks, the first leading indicators of recessions and recovery in 1950. The organization has primarily served major institutions, including some central banks, since its inception.

Last May, the ECRI (www.businesscycle.com) developed a "lite" version, a subset of its studies that would be accessible to individual investors. For $9.99 a month (a two-week free trial is available), individuals get access to the Recession-Recovery Watch at 10 a.m. Eastern time every Friday. This brief report contains just a handful of charts, but it speaks volumes about the economy's direction and the state of the business cycle. Charts track the Weekly Leading Index for the past 30 years and the most recent year, along with inflationary pressures and true cyclical turns, along with leading indicators of home prices versus actual home prices over 30 years.

The report examines indicators' ability to predict actual economic change, growth and inflation. (The Weekly Leading Index has been trending lower for several weeks and, according to the site, the growth outlook is bleak while inflation is in an upswing.) Data tables for the underlying historical numbers can be opened in Excel format. The Economic Cycle Research Institute is frequently quoted in the press, but serious students of the economy should consider this site's data and charts as just one part of their investing toolbox.

High on Lo

Bloggers either post too infrequently for our taste, don't point readers to enough outside resources, tell us a little too much about themselves (or, conversely, present themselves anonymously) or post off-color jokes. Hence, we're having a hard time finding a financial blog we like as much as the Kirk Report (www.kirkreport.com), which we featured two weeks ago.

We did, however, find PowerSwings (www.powerswings.com) intriguing. It was created by Teresa Lo, who, with more than a decade of stock-brokerage experience, was co-founder of TrendVue (www.trendvue.com) and the developer of the PowerSwings Indicator, her suite of studies and indicators. (PowerTools will be available for IQ Chart and eSignal soon). Lo's book, Streetwise Technical Trading, is available online for $275, or $1.95 to $5.95 per chapter.

Lo's blog, with its sometimes acerbic tone, combines market news and analysis with charts and links to other online articles (just a few; Lo says she "rarely reads other peoples' stuff"). Her arguments and commentary are intelligent and clear, but she sometimes doesn't publish for several days; at other times, she pads her blogs with nuggets like the lyrics from a song from the movie Yentl and the recipe for a "perfect" breakfast. We suspect, however, that she saves the best stuff for her Private Client Group ($200 a month -- $50 off currently for online registration -- or $2.95 for one Daily Transcript).

Seek and Ye May Find

If you use Windows search tool to find a document, you might as well make a sandwich while it's working. Yet many years ago, we saw a demo of a new product that claimed to index your entire hard drive and make searches fast and comprehensive. The product evolved over the years, and today's Enfish 6.1 Find (www.enfish.com) is ready for serious consideration. Its searches are almost instantaneous, and include files in Office applications, contacts and e-mails, Internet Explorer Favorites, and more. You can view results by file type in a preview pane and add a toolbar to Office applications. We found it preferable to Google's new Desktop Search. It costs $49.95; a free trial is offered.

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